Anthropocentric framing of wildlife use in SA is neither scientifically grounded nor ethically neutral

The 23 March 2026 article by Dr Jeanetta Selier and Professor Sam Ferreira raises questions of genuine importance: how should South Africa manage its wildlife, and what role should “regulated” hunting play in conservation?

This is an important debate, but it is also one that requires clarity, because the framing presented in the article by Selier and Ferreira risks obscuring more than it reveals, undermining its core conclusions. This response addresses three distinct problems: a false equivalence between hunting and tourism; a conflation of landscape health with species-level sustainability; and an overstated portrayal of South Africa’s monitoring and quota-setting processes as scientifically rigorous and transparent.

The false equivalence between hunting and tourism

The shared precondition fallacy

The article’s central philosophical argument runs as follows: both wildlife tourism and trophy hunting depend on healthy ecosystems; therefore, both produce equivalent conservation outcomes; therefore, both are equally justified forms of wildlife use. This reasoning commits what philosophers call the fallacy of the undistributed middle, inferring equivalence from shared properties that are, in fact, merely necessary preconditions, not defining characteristics. At the centre of the argument is a seemingly intuitive claim: that wildlife tourism and trophy hunting both depend on healthy ecosystems, and therefore both produce equivalent conservation outcomes by virtue of the commercial activity generated by it. It is a neat idea. It is also a misleading one. Sharing a dependency is not the same as sharing an outcome.

To illustrate: tourism development, trophy hunting and even prostitution all add to economic activity and even development; this shared dependency does not make them morally or functionally equivalent sectors.

Both tourism and hunting require wildlife to exist. That much is true. But what they do to wildlife populations is fundamentally different. Tourism derives its value from the continued presence of animals. A leopard seen today remains part of the system tomorrow. Hunting, by definition, removes individuals from that system. It is a consumptive act, that commoditises its dead body, and in species such as leopards, that removal is not ecologically neutral. The fact that both safari tourism and trophy hunting require living wildlife populations tells us nothing meaningful about whether these activities are comparable in their effects, their ethics or their conservation outcomes.

The consumption asymmetry

The article attempts to equalise tourism and hunting by pointing to shared environmental costs such as carbon emissions, water use and infrastructure; what we might call the consumption asymmetry. These are real impacts, but they operate at a different level. They are indirect system-level pressures. They are not equivalent to the direct, selective removal of individuals from a wildlife population, particularly in species where individual roles matter. Conflating these categories does not clarify the trade-offs. It obscures the central ecological question: how each activity affects population viability within and among individual species and individuals of a species.

Wildlife tourism, by its fundamental nature, preserves the subject of its value. A leopard photographed at sunset is still a leopard the following morning, available to be seen again, to breed, to fulfil its ecological role, and its role in its environment and population. Trophy hunting is categorically different: it permanently and irreversibly removes individual animals and their genes from the population, alters the ecology of the area and while often dresses up as “sustainable and controlled”, it is driven by financial reward, a thrill, or the trophy, as a singular act of financial reward in the act of commoditising a public ecological asset for private gain.

This is not a trivial distinction. It is the central one. The authors attempt to paper over this asymmetry by noting that both activities have equivalent ecological footprints in that tourists fly in planes, consume water and generate carbon emissions, for example. This is true, but irrelevant to the central comparison. The ecological costs of photographic tourism infrastructure are real, but they do not involve the targeted removal of apex predators or large mammals from wild populations, let alone thousands of kilometres of ecologically damaging fencing, social structure disruptions and selective trophy harvests. Conflating these two categories of impact is not an analytical observation; it is a rhetorical manoeuvre.

The Selier and Ferreira article presents itself as scientifically grounded and ethically neutral, but its framing is neither. It is built on a deeply anthropocentric foundation, one that measures nature’s value almost exclusively through human utility, that is, the “if it pays it stays” hunting mantra.

More specifically, it reflects the interests of a narrow constituency: South Africa’s approximately 2,500 professional hunters, an estimated 200,000 biltong hunters, many of these occasional or inactive, and between 6,000 and 9000 foreign trophy hunters. That these groups together represent a tiny fraction of South Africa’s population of 63 million, let alone the global community that has a legitimate stake in the fate of leopards, elephants and black rhinos, is never acknowledged.

What makes this framing of the article particularly troubling is who is doing the framing. Selier is a senior scientist at the South African National Biodiversity Institute, and Ferreira is a senior conservation ecologist with South African National Parks, representing institutions that sit at the heart of the very policy and quota-setting processes the article defends. These are not detached academic commentators offering independent analysis; they are senior government-aligned officials whose institutions are directly responsible for implementing the management frameworks they are publicly advocating and eulogising. This represents a profound and undisclosed conflict of interest.

The article’s insistence that conservation decisions should be guided by extractive human perspectives rooted in cultural and economic context is not a neutral scientific position, it is a philosophical one that happens to privilege precisely those who benefit financially and recreationally from continued consumptive use, advanced by officials whose institutional mandates are bound up in that same system. When a framework serving 2,500 professional hunters and their international clients is presented as sound conservation policy for species that belong to ecological commons, and when that argument is made by the very officials empowered to set and enforce the quotas in question, the anthropocentric bias is not incidental, it is the entire architecture of the argument, and the conflict of interest is its foundation.

South African law designates biodiversity as a public trust asset to be administered by the state as trustee for all people. When state officials advocate for quota systems that serve narrow extractive interests, they undermine the very legal obligation that binds them.

The false equivalence extended: A reductio ad absurdum

The logical structure of the article’s argument would justify almost any economically productive activity that incidentally depends on a functioning natural system. Consider: artisanal fishing, industrial fishing and illegal poaching all share the same precondition – healthy fish or wildlife populations. By the article’s logic, all three produce equivalent conservation outcomes because all three depend on that precondition. This is self-evidently illogical.

The same structure applies across sectors. Tourism, trophy hunting and bushmeat poaching all require living animals. Economic development, sustainable farming and land conversion all require functioning soil systems. Shared dependency on a resource does not confer moral or functional equivalence between the activities that exploit it.

The suggestion that objections to hunting are matters of “personal preference” underestimates the nature of the concern. Just like racism, colonialism and even slavery were promoted as personal preferences at a time, usually from the position of entitlement. For many, the deliberate killing of sentient, often protected species for recreation raises substantive ethical questions. These are not trivial distinctions in taste. They influence social legitimacy, compliance and long-term conservation outcomes. Ignoring this dimension weakens the policy argument rather than strengthening it.

The article’s framework provides no principled basis for distinguishing responsible from irresponsible use or management, which renders it analytically useless as a conservation policy guide. It is political manoeuvring to justify the quotas.

The moral dimension cannot be dismissed

The authors acknowledge that “some people will always disagree with hunting on ethical grounds” but quickly move to suggest that conservation policy cannot be built on “personal likes and dislikes”. This framing is a false dichotomy. Ethical objections to trophy hunting are not mere matters of taste equivalent to preferring chocolate over vanilla. They involve substantive moral claims about the deliberate killing of sentient, often endangered animals for recreation and trophies, claims that deserve engagement, not dismissal.

There is a meaningful difference between saying “I personally dislike hunting” and saying “the deliberate killing of an endangered black rhinoceros, elephant or leopard for sport raises serious ethical questions that cannot be resolved simply by pointing to regulatory compliance”. By collapsing these positions into one, the argument avoids engaging with the ethical dimension altogether, rather than engaging it directly. Our courts have repeatedly guided us to consider ethics in the management of our wildlife.

Conflating landscape health with species-level sustainability

The spatial scale problem

A recurring rhetorical move in the article is to shift between two different levels of analysis; landscape-wide ecological health on the one hand, and species-level population sustainability on the other, without flagging this as a shift. The result is an argument that appears coherent but is equivocating between two distinct claims.

When the authors write that both tourism and hunting “require large landscapes” and “working ecological processes”, they are making a claim at the landscape scale. But when they defend hunting quotas as sustainable, they shift to population-level arguments about specific species. These are not the same thing. A landscape can be ecologically healthy in broad terms while a specific population within it, say, a leopard population in a particular catchment area, is under significant stress from a combination of habitat pressures, prey depletion, human-wildlife conflict and hunting offtake. There is no acknowledgment that currently there is no data that realistically reflect the mortality of leopards from illegal killings, whether from accidents on roads, illegal killings due to claimed depredations of livestock, or cultural harvests.

The article never grapples with this distinction between landscape and species-level threats. The result is that broad claims about landscape health are used to provide cover for very specific claims about species-level harvest sustainability, claims that require entirely different and much more rigorous evidence. In South Africa, where only a small proportion of land is formally protected and connectivity in reality is constrained, these distinctions are not theoretical. They are central to how populations function, and specifically for solitary and wide-ranging species like leopards that are not contained by fences.

Using broad claims about ecosystem condition to support species-level harvest decisions avoids the need for species-specific evidence. The authors also conflate parameters that affect leopards and mega-herbivores like rhino and elephants, which function via wildly different population dynamics.

Individual selection matters more than acknowledged

The authors note correctly that “individuals within populations are not all equal in their ecological roles”, but then apply this principle inconsistently. For black rhino, they suggest that only post-reproductive adult males will be targeted in trophy hunts without suggesting how this will be determined and policed. For leopards, a species in which I have deep experience, the claim is that only males over seven years of age will be hunted. But the article does not acknowledge the significant evidence from population ecology in leopards, for example, that the removal of dominant males can have cascading social effects, including infanticide by incoming males, disruption of territory structures increasing the potential of lethal territorial fights, and suppression of female reproductive success. Not to mention the questionable claims that sexes and ages can be identified in hunts and are identified in hunts, let alone policed.

These are known metapopulation dynamics influencing species survival, not hypothetical concerns. A quota system that counts individuals removed without incorporating these secondary effects risks underestimating population-level impacts, especially so with leopards who exist in low densities, across vast ranges, and are a solitary species. These are not marginal considerations. They are core to understanding how populations respond to selective harvest.

A quota system that counts individual animals removed without modelling these downstream population-level effects is not engaging with the full complexity of leopard biology, regardless of how well-designed its permit process appears on paper.

The questionable basis of monitoring and quota science

The non-detriment findings report problem

The article cites South Africa’s Non-Detriment Findings (NDFs) for elephant, leopard and black rhino as evidence that “regulated hunting (and trade) is not detrimental to the survival of these populations in the wild”. What the article omits is the history of these findings, and the troubling episode of the 2015 Leopard NDF.

In 2015, South Africa’s own scientific assessment by the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) produced findings that did not support the continuation of leopard trophy hunting and exports at the then existing quota levels. Yet hunting quotas were not meaningfully revised in response to this finding, which stand at 150 CITES trophies allocated to South Africa. If the system functions as a genuine adaptive management loop, as the article claims and pontificates, then a negative NDF should trigger significant quota reduction and/or suspension.

This did not occur in any consistent or precautionary way, only for the current environment minister, Willie Aucamp, to reinstate the quotes for hunting leopards, elephants and black rhino in February this year, and now defended by the authors. Instead, quota decisions have shifted only intermittently, often under public pressure or legal challenge, raising serious questions about whether the science is genuinely driving policy, as claimed by the authors, or whether it is being used selectively to justify predetermined outcomes.

Not only did the 2015 Leopard NDF come out as negative to continue trade in the species, but SANBI, under the leadership of one of the authors, then attempted to suggest that leopard exports should continue regardless, and it was only walked back after a massive public outcry, a process resulting in the lack of trust in whether our institutions are conserving appropriately and adequately. The problem is not only historical. The most recent comprehensive NDF on leopards is more than a decade old. NDFs are meant to rest on current, robust scientific evidence to guide quotas. Continuing to cite outdated findings, or currently contested “monitoring” as justification for ongoing harvest is not adaptive management. It reflects institutional inertia in a system reluctant to revisit decisions transparently or in response to scientific uncertainty with precaution.

The broader concern is one of credibility. When defendable scientific assessments do not lead to clear policy consequences, confidence in the quota setting process is undermined. A system cannot credibly present itself as science-based and adaptive if adverse findings fail to produce proportionate management responses.

Opacity in monitoring methodology

National monitoring systems, census data, including camera trap surveys, provide valuable data. But they are not without limitations. The article presents South Africa’s monitoring systems, particularly the National Leopard Monitoring Project using camera traps, as though they are transparent and constitute an independently verifiable scientific basis for quota-setting, when in reality they carry uncertainty that is rarely communicated clearly in policy contexts. This characterisation overstates what is actually known publicly about these surveys, their methodology, transparency and verification of outcomes, and the manipulation by the very authors to influence these research and policy outputs.

Several concerns are worth raising. First, camera-trap surveys conducted over limited periods in specific areas are then extrapolated to generate national density estimates without the achieving of asymptotes in the field monitoring. The spatial and temporal scope of these surveys, the statistical models used to translate raw detection data into density estimates, and the error bounds around those estimates are not publicly disclosed in a form that allows independent scientific scrutiny, nor public accountability. The research is entirely based on quantitative sciences and fails to assess qualitative and ethological impacts on the species, which are based on baseline population estimates at the nadir of the species populations after centuries of persecution.

Parts of the system rely on self-reported data from landowners and operators who have financial interests in policy and quota outcomes. This does not invalidate the data, but it does raise questions about veracity. For example, the system relies heavily on self-reporting from private landowners, for elephants and rhinos in particular. Properties must submit annual reports detailing births, deaths and removals. But the accuracy of these reports is not subject to routine independent verification. A system of monitoring that depends on the honesty of parties who have financial interests in the outcome of quota decisions is not a robust monitoring system, it is a compliance mechanism with limited accountability, if any at all, and requires review.

Additionally, the article notes that “hunt return forms” provide data used to refine leopard population models. But these forms are submitted by hunting operators, who, again, have financial incentives and are not verified. The scientific independence of data generated in this way must be considered carefully before it is presented as the basis for national conservation policy and presented as “science”.

The result is a system with a lack of transparency and limited accountability, effectively reliant on a “trust us” approach from state authorities that has not engendered public confidence. This occurs alongside persistent lack of transparency in the permitting systems, despite court orders requiring disclosures.

Adaptive management requires genuine responsiveness

The authors present the quota system as an example of adaptive management: a dynamic, science-responsive framework that adjusts to new information. Adaptive management is not simply any system that includes monitoring and adjustments. It requires genuine willingness to act on monitoring findings, and public scrutiny of outcomes, even when those findings are inconvenient.

The 2015 leopard NDF episode suggests that when science conflicts with established hunting quotas, the system’s response has been to continue the hunting rather than adaptation. This pattern, where monitoring exists and reports are generated but policy remains static, is better described as monitoring theatre than adaptive management. Real adaptive management would have clear, transparent, pre-specified decision rules: If population indicators decline after transparently rigorous assessments, what actions follow? If sustainability assessments are uncertain or negative, what decisions are triggered? Without explicit decision rules, monitoring risks becoming descriptive rather than operational and the system has no binding mechanism to ensure that monitoring results determine changes/outcomes.

The authors misrepresent the facts, mischaracterise their “science” and are silent in the government’s complicity in misleading the public. A system that observes change but does not consistently respond to it cannot be considered adaptive. And based on historical practice by the authorities, inclusive of the “scientific authority”, SANBI and the environment department, is political theatre rather than science that informs policy and action.

What a responsible framework would look like

This critique does not argue that all culling is inherently unjustifiable, especially in closed ecological systems, or that tourism is without ecological cost. These are complex questions that deserve honest engagement and values-based inquiries that ought to be engaged. What it does argue is that the framework presented by Selier and Ferreira falls short of the rigour it claims, in the following specific ways:

• It treats a shared precondition (healthy ecosystems) as evidence of equivalence between fundamentally different activities;
• It conflates landscape-scale ecological health with species-level harvest sustainability, and suggests that the species assessments are equivalent; and
• It presents a monitoring and quota system as transparent and science-driven while omitting evidence of systemic opacity and selective application of scientific findings.

It dismisses ethical objections as mere personal preferences, rather than engaging with their substantive content. A genuinely responsible framework for wildlife use in South Africa would require:

• Transparent access to data, models and assumptions of underlying models that inform policy and quotas;
• Independent verification of monitoring inputs of landowner-submitted monitoring reports;
• Clearly pre-specified, binding decision rules that trigger automatic quota reductions or suspensions when monitoring thresholds are crossed;
• Regular transparent renewal of NDFs that are fully consulted, on a five-year cycle, rather than reliance on more than decade-old assessments;
• Explicit incorporation of the population-level effects of individual removal, including social disruption, infanticide risk and genetic loss of low-density and wide-ranging species;
• Full disclosure of all permits issued on all biodiversity harvests on a publicly accessible registry instead of allocations of public trust biodiversity assets for private gain in secrecy;
• Recognition of ethical and welfare considerations as part of conservation governance instead of dismissal of such as a “personal preference”; and
• Genuine consultation with stakeholders.

When ecologists venture into moral philosophy without disciplinary training or acknowledgement of that boundary, and when their conclusions are then embedded into policy and administrative frameworks by the very institutions that employ them, the result is not enlightened conservation, it is the laundering of contested ethical positions through the authority of science, which in itself is contested.

Conservation outcomes matter. So does the intellectual honesty with which we pursue them. The authors are right that conservation often emerges from complex relationships between people, wildlife and landscapes. They are right that every use of biodiversity involves trade-offs. But complexity does not justify analytical shortcuts. Trade-offs do not justify false equivalence. And regulatory structure and adaptive management without transparent rules does not substitute for ecological evidence.

If hunting is to be defended as a conservation tool, it must be evaluated on its actual ecological and ethical effects, not on the fact that it shares a dependency with other activities. South Africa’s wildlife deserves a better level of rigour, and so does the public debate about its future. DM